Architecture undergraduate Eric Cheng won the 2011 Schiff Foundation Fellowship for his work in Associate Professor John Ronan’s Fall 2010 advanced studio, “Cemetery for the Unclaimed.” The studio project explored issues of memory and ritual through the creation of a cemetery for Chicago’s unclaimed dead—the ten to twenty people who die every month in Chicago and remain unclaimed and alone in death. Cheng’s project, “Nesting,” used fallen sticks and saplings woven around individual steel pipes to create a cluster of rings that form a community and restore the value and identity of the unclaimed.

The Schiff Foundation Fellowship is administered by the Art Institute of Chicago for the purpose of supporting young architects. As the Schiff Foundation winner, Eric Cheng receives a $15,000 award and his project will become part of the permanent collection of architectural drawings housed within the Ernest R. Graham Study Center for Architectural Drawings at the Art Institute of Chicago.